Transcript: Episode 208
208. Guest: Marth Straus, PhD
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[Short piano piece is played, lasting about 20 seconds]
Today, our guest is Martha Straus, PhD. She is a professor in the Department of Clinical Psychology at Antioch University New England graduate school in New Hampshire. Dr. Strauss is an international trainer on topics related to child, adolescent and family development, attachment, trauma and therapy. She's the author of numerous articles and five books, including most recently Treating Trauma in Adolescents: Development, Attachment, and the Therapeutic Relationship. She lives in Vermont where she also maintains a small private practice. Welcome Dr. Straus.
*Interview begins*
[Note: Interviewer in bold. Interviewee in standard font]
My name is Dr. Martha Straus. I'm a clinical psychologist, and I've been practicing for a long while. I live in Southern Vermont. And I teach at Antioch University New England in a clinical psychology PsyD program. And I've been interested in working with, and doing research on, and writing about trauma in kids and families for many years. I’m particularly interested in adolescence, and identity development and the traumatic impact on identity in the transition to adulthood. And I guess these days, speaking more about all of those things that I just said, but in the pandemic.
How did you get involved in working with children and trauma, or adolescence and trauma, in the first place?
I was interested in working with children and have since actually I was about 12, a child myself. I was volunteering and one of these strange people that sort of knew what I wanted to do from forever. Which is interesting because my own children and most people I know have such a harder time figuring it out. I think that I've had to work hard to even become more understanding of that because it has felt almost like a calling. I don't mean that in some cosmic way. But just something that really motivated and excited me. I got into the forensic, our forensic world. I was working with kids, I was in graduate school. And I started getting very interested in kids in the system, in the foster care system, in the juvenile justice system, school to prison pipeline, and noticing certain patterns emerging—not so subtle—that a lot of these kids shared a lot of early childhood adversity. And got to have opportunities both in graduate school, my postdoc and my internship, working in that place where the kids in the court system meet up. Highly contentious divorces, termination of parental rights. And all of those elements ended up moving me towards being interested in working with kids and families were really contending with a lot of intergenerational and compounded vertical trauma issues passed down and how to intervene effectively and thinking about that. So through working with children in the courts also.
And then I guess raising kids of my own, that spurred it a little bit. And my own wild adolescence. But I realized at some point in his professional trajectory that I really liked the challenge of being challenged and dissed by teenagers. There was something energizing about that and curiously interesting to me. Like it wasn't hard or scary, or they wouldn't talk to me. I didn't seem to be too upset by that. And people thought that’s an unusual skill set. So I think I got encouraged because of seeming to be fearless. And it wasn't about fear so much. It's just curiosity and engagement. And I'm 64 and I still feel that curiosity and engagement when I work with adolescents, and particularly adolescents who have really struggled to overcome a lot of tough stuff in the beginning, abuse and neglect and parenting that was sub subpar from an early age.
How do you explain historical trauma to parents or family or a adolescent? How do you talk about that?
What a great question. It comes up. Because when I work with whole families, and I extend my great empathy to parents, especially with teenagers, and how hard it is to raise teenagers. And I talked about what the resources that we have to have and what we bring in to the mix when we're raising kids, and how do you learn to do what you learn, based on what you were exposed to. And I do a pretty detailed as many generation genogram as I can early on. And, you know, it's not always the case. But it's often the case that people have a lot of compounded generation to generation experiences with parenting challenges, mental illness in the family and substance abuse. And it's very hard to pass things on to your kids that you haven't learned to do, and to be loving and nurturing if people have not historically extended that to you. And so I think I come at it through tremendous empathy for how hard it must be to provide something to your kids that you yourself haven't had.
I’m very interested in this idea of coregulation. So I model it for families, too, that I see myself as the coregulator of these caregivers and parents, so that they can become coregulators for their emotionally behaviorally dysregulated teenagers. I point out that something that all parents know, which is that if you have a kid who is really in distress and you get upset too, it doesn't make it better. It invariably escalates the situation. So to the extent that I can model, and teach, and support empathic attunement, and not getting all reactive yourself and staying grounded and present with the families, I think that I help them have more self-empathy and more confidence dealing with the emerging storm with dysregulated teenagers.
How do you see trauma impacting the identity of adolescents?
Oh, it becomes part of who we are right? I think that when I started out in grad school, people would be talking about healing from trauma or resolving trauma. We had a lot of curious language around early traumatic exposure. And that it was supposed to be something that we you could get over.
I'm really curious and interested in how in adolescence we developed into much more complex beings. That when we're 10 years old, the way we think about ourselves and who we are in the world tends to be more unitary. And something happens as the brain expands and changes in terms of the complexity. But we certainly all have complexity and parts. And I think about working with adolescent trauma from a little bit of that perspective, that, that people have traumatized parts. And they are more than that of course. And that identity is is woven into the way we take care of ourselves and each other, and how parts of us are working to coordinate and adapt. And I usually try to do some kind of identity, you know, experiential experiential identity exercises where we're talking about the parts of you. And when your part that is deeply mistrusting because she's been hurt shows up, how does she take care or you? What does she do? How does she react? And so the people come to understand and embrace and feel compassion, self-compassion for their complexity, and not thinking of themselves as any one thing. You know, we tend in our culture to have trauma be very defining, like “Oh, there, I'm a traumatized person.” And I think that I like to say that I'm a person who experienced trauma, and contending with it, and dealing with it and working to resist the effects of trauma, the kind of memories that I have, the body memories that I have, that take me over and don't allow me to get great joy and pleasure in my life now. So giving more regulated wider platform and self-awareness of identity.
When you are talking with adolescents about the different parts of them, do you use terminology about dissociation? Or how do you explain that?
Yeah, I do. I mean, it depends on, I mean I'm not giving you a one size fits all answer to this. But I do talk about this idea. Well, one ideas is symptoms is body memories. So that, uh, and dissociation is a symptom. So that when they get overwhelmed the part of them that dissociates is taking care them, runs the show. And it's actually I mean, there's a lot of problems, obviously, with the dissociation, but it's a phenomenal adaptation to early traumatic exposure, right? That you can protect yourself from overwhelm by checking out. The problem is, when you're checked out, you're not learning and being in a relationship and relying on people to help take care of you. That’s pretty complicated response, but it's certainly very understandable. So yeah, I think dissociate, that dissociated parts of us really need tender loving care because they're really working overtime to keep us from having unconscious awareness while we, a threat that we think is a threat, whether it really is or not. And whether whether it is or not, it doesn't matter in our bodies. If we think it is we go, we go to those places of trauma, people go to those places. Including, you know, real dissociation or variations on that. We're checking out a little bit or getting so activated that we’re reacting all the time, and just in constant motion, and talking a lot, and getting into fights, and doing whatever our body is dictating to do, which is dissociate in a certain way also, right. But helping them understand that these are body memories when when they get symptomatic, when they get anxious, or panicky or rageful. And they don't know why maybe. Because if you have early trauma from before that 18 months old, there's no left hemisphere on board to make a story about what happens to their bodies or remembering stuff. Right? Like the Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score.
So even when they don't know why they're having this big reaction, their body is giving them a really important information. And so I'm always very interested in working with kind of the below the neck stuff that's happening, and the emotionality, because there's I think it's tremendous information about what this kid did to survive. And I think it helps create a much more heroic narrative. Wow, look at this, your body is reminding you that you did amazing things to survive here. And it's remembering stuff that you don't even have any conscious awareness. How could you? It happened when you were so little. And here you are to tell the tale. So you survived. It worked?
I think it's significant because usually when people who know or have experience trauma and dissociation at some level, so often when we talk about body memories we're talking about something that is specific to a specific memory, like a bruise, for example, kind of reappearing. And this really broadens that definition. Because we also sometimes talk about how flashbacks can be emotional. But you're talking about literally the body itself as a whole, and neurologically, containing that experience from even preverbal. That it's not just the wound of a specific abuse incident, but of the trauma and relational trauma as well. Which is huge with the research that's come out this year on relational trauma.
Right. And the thing about developmental trauma, attachment trauma, whatever lang-, complex childhood trauma, whatever people want to terminology people use for that, is that it is all relational trauma. I think that is what distinguishes developmental trauma, you know, from PTSD and from what our most useful nomenclature. You know, we were unable to get the developmental trauma disorder into the DSM for lots of I think not very good reasons.
But one of the, I mean, there's some features of this. One is that the abuse is, takes place in the central caretaking relationship, right. The person who is tasked with caring for the child is dangerous and the child survival depends on this person meeting their most fundamental needs. It's an awful dilemma that kids have. Right? To be in that bind. And the other piece of this is that there’s, there is very, it's very unusual if there is a single incident. It's multiple, it's cascading, it's compounding. So that it's all kinds of things happening. You know, you're, you're neglected, and then you're hungry, or you get into fights, and then you get put in the special ed class and you don't have the access to the same kids, or you can get put in the foster care system. Or you have traumatic loss because somebody goes to jail or dies. I mean, these kids have a lot. There's no capital T like one Trauma. It's a, it's a traumatic life or a life of a fairly chronic stress and adversity.
And so it isn't an explicit memory, this thing. I mean, it can be. But for most of the kids that I work with who have long standing trauma, they may have a couple bad memories. But that's very much the tip of the iceberg. You know.
It really broadens our understanding of trauma and the body memories, both. Like it really changes things, that perspective.
Yeah, it does. Because instead of feeling crazy, it makes the kids understand, feel like “oh, this makes perfect sense.” Even even symptoms that people think are really terrible. And they are terrible symptoms, things like self-harm. I mean, within this framework, of course the part of you that is trying to keep you okay is trying to figure out what how to manage overwhelm, and is coming up with strategies that I mean, I think a lot of these strategies I tell us about self-harm and substance abuse, these are strategies that almost work. You know, I mean, they don't fully work for obvious reasons. But they do almost work. And then you’ve got to honor that. That this a child, I mean, a kid figuring out how to survive unfathomably difficult lives. And they're coming up with strategies to quell a really, really hot overactivated and overwhelmed nervous system. You’ve got to hand it to them.
It so empowering to move from a place of “I'm crazy. I feel crazy. I don't understand what's going on. I don't know what's wrong with me. Why can't I stop it? Why can't I be normal?” To understanding “This is how it works. And this is my response neurologically or physically or in my body as an entity and these parts in me. That there's a reason it's all happening. And why it's happening. And how it's happening.” Because understanding that takes away so much of the shame of what's going on and what someone is experiencing, and replaces it with hope.
Absolutely. You got it. I have a I have a young woman I've been working with over a very long period of time, she's in her mid-20s now, and I started seeing her when she was about 16 or so. With a pretty severe trauma history. And she's in her first pretty stable relationship with a young man who seems like a basically nice guy. Which is the first time ever she's found herself not with an abusive addict. He's neither of those things. And it's kind of exciting to talk to her in that way. And she has this great rap that very recently, we were talking and they had had a conflict. She tends to be a very hyper activated. When she gets anxious, she freaks out still quite a bit. I mean, her body is is really pretty tightly wired in how she lives in the world in a pretty hypervigilant way. But she has this amazing kind of pride and self-awareness of it now. And I guess they had, they had some kind of dispute. And she just laid a rap on him about “Look, I'm wired this way now. And this is what I need. When I get like this, this is what I need from you in order to get better regulated.” I mean, she has all the language and everything now. She’s been working for years. But she's really moved from a real victim, overwhelmed, not able to be in school, to being able to hold on a job and in the steady relationship. I mean, it's quite a, I mean it's 10 years long, nine years, 10 years long in the making. So it just didn't happen overnight. But I was pretty freakin delighted to hear her tell the story of how she not only advocated for herself, but she did it from a pretty conscious and self-aware place. You know, even as she was freaking out about whatever she was freaking out about. That's amazing. Yeah, yeah, it's a beautiful story. For me, it was a beautiful moment for me.
Tell me about your work with the pandemic and what you have seen with those you’re helping and the adolescent response to the quarantine and everything else about what's going on.
Yeah. So you know. As an old person who hasn't, I mean, I have done some teletherapy over the years, but certainly not as a full time experience. I have a private practice. I give it eight hours of direct client care a week, in addition to teaching and other stuff. So I in March, like everyone else, I moved completely into the zoom land. And I had a lot of trepidation about it because my work is this, I use this developmental relational model in my work. And I feel so much that intersubjectivity that the way I connect and and in the presence of these kids and offer them my fully regulated adult brain to calm and cold their hot brain. I mean, I have all of what I think about is so profoundly interpersonal intersubjective in the same space. And I, I live in Vermont, so I have this like pretty hooley way of thinking about this. But I have this beautiful office. And I really think of it as a sacred space overlooking the Connecticut River. It has, the light comes in these big windows, and cozy old seating arrangements, and it's just there's something about it, you go in there and it's calming. And I can provide that, you know, as a holding environment. And so moving on to the spiritual thing where people are, and you know, teenagers that have got their gadgets and gizmos on, and there's so much distraction, and really trying to settle down to it. I had a lot of trepidation.
And I would say about 80% of my anxiety was ill founded, I'll stick to about 20% of it. But you know, these are kids, these Gen Z's, you know, who, there amphibious. They grew up not making that much of a distinction between the online life and the offline life is as I do. And they're pretty comfortable with the platform. Yeah, let’s zoom, let’s FaceTime, whatever, you know, they're, they're very relaxed about this in a way that I certainly was not. And there's been opportunities, I guess, that come out of it. I have one 16 year old girl, for example, who has a pretty troubled relationship with her dad who's no longer physically abused, but is still pretty controlling and verbally intimidating at best. And, you know, we're working on this, and she's doing a great job setting limits with him. He's working on it too. And we'll be talking in her house. And all of a sudden, she'll move into the chat function on the zoom and say, “My dad's outside the door, I'm changing the subject.” And so she chit chats with me for a minute. And then then she then she chats, you know, “coast is clear” or whatever, and we go back to what we were talking about. And so that's been kind of interesting in terms of safety and privacy and those concerns that I had, and how to maneuver that and manage that during COVID. Particularly with families where I couldn't really guarantee the safety of the young clients that I'm treating. And so that was a nice, a nice feature.
And so there's, you know, there's tough parts to those, just as you and I experienced at the beginning, where I find myself working really hard to hear and see and understand. And there's, you know, voice delays and screen freezes. And all those kinds of technological events that hang up and try again. We're working so hard just to stay connected in a way that it's already hard with these kids in the same room. And so that has, that sort of account for some of my frustration. But I have pretty interesting, you know, collection of stories that I'm accumulating that suggest, you know, maybe if they can find a safe, stable place with a decent connection—which is a social justice issue as you know in rural America, and I'm in rural America too—that a lot of kids who need therapy don't have the bandwidth literally in their homes, or or the computer hook up that they need to be able to do this in a reliable and safe way. And that's a whole other downside to this.
But I would say by and large, as we're moving into mid six months of doing this, I am finding it actually offering a lot more flexibility with busy kids who only have a little time in their schedules. We can sneak it right in there in a free block if they're not at school. Or even if they're doing sports or stuff like that, we can work around it because they're not having to drive a long time to get to my office. So I'm also seeing the plus side just in terms of the logistics of doing therapy with teenagers. Also I have to invite them the night before. So my no show and “oh, whoops, I forgot, is it too late?” rate is extremely low. It's almost zero now, basically zero. Because I just remind them, I'm reminding them the night before by invitation.
Tell me more about what you mentioned. You mentioned the developmental relational model. Can you tell me more about that?
Yeah. Can I put in a plug for my book which talks all about it? I have a book called Treating Trauma in Adolescents that came out on Guilford Press a couple of years ago. And it's based in this model. Which is really a model that incorporates relational theory and developmental theory in some key ways. One is that I think that therapy, I'll just tell you a couple of them, not going into the whole thing. But one, a couple of key key ideas.
But one is the therapy is a two person system. It's a dyadic system. And when it works, we both change. And there's a lot of really interesting from the interpersonal neurobiology world, Dan Siegel and Allan Schore, and those people, that our brains change as a result of effective therapy to our clients, when it goes well, they have an impact on us also. And with working with traumatized adolescence, it really, they really need to know that they have an impact on you in order in real time and experiential time. And so that's a big piece of it. And then it's not cognitive, cognitive understanding. It's an emotion changing emotion. So when we're talking about regulation and love and attachment, we're really talking about the enterprise of being with another human being, and trying to stay connected with them, and repairing ruptures to reconnect when we're feeling like we're moving away and disconnecting. And so it's very effectively experientially based in the actual relationship in the room. And the piece of it that's developmental, besides the fact that they're adolescence and they're changing and amazing rate. And so you have to hear the therapy, how much you're playing and talking, and how long you can take or stand on any given subject, and what what the enterprise is, is very developmentally embedded, But also your adult presence matters.
So I, I became an adult at some point along the way in this work, and determined that I really had to show up as a fully formed adult having done my own work. Because these kids who are under parented, or I've had many kids who said to me, and at first it was daunting but now I kind of really try to step up to it, which is that I'm the only grown up in their lives. You know, I'm the only grown up that really talks to them in their whole lives. They haven't known any real grownups. And so that's a role that I embody. And I say stuff like, I'm not going to be the tell you kids talk to you about going to a party where bad stuff was likely to happen, you know. And I'll say, “Look, I'm not going to be at the party. I'm going to love you just the same on Monday. But do you want to know what I think?” And I don't do this with adults. I do this with kids. Because I'm an adult. And this is a therapy with a kid. And so I really show up in this developmental relational model as a caring adult the way kids who are parents inadequately have people to do that for them. I think there is an adult slash parental role, that this therapy requires. And they invariably say, “Yeah, I want to know what you think.” The reason they told you that they're going to this ridiculous keg party in the woods is because they want to know what the impact of that is on you. And you know, that you're concerned, am I concerned for their safety, is paramount. And I get to tell them, and I get to use my adult brain to say, you know, “The last time you went to a party, this happened, and I'm concerned for you because I don't want to see you, you know, have to go through having to reconstitute yourself for weeks again after you get exposed to really traumatic and scary stuff and get vulnerable and unsafe while we’re working to help you take better care of yourself, I'm worried about that.”
So that's another feature of the development relational theory is that it's a therapy with an adult between an adult and someone who's not an adult. And I get to use my fully fledged adult cortex to add the emotional regulatory systems to help them problem solve and become better regulated. Because they can't do it for themselves. And so it's the last thing I'll say about this is that it's very much a coregulation theory. That the way we learn to self-regulate is through co regulation. Babies who are crying get picked up a whole lot in early infancy and childhood, early childhood. And they learn how to, what it feels like to be held and regulated from having it done literally for them. You're falling apart, you're crying, somebody picks you up and holds you. And over time, if you're lucky, you get to know what that feels like so you know the difference between regulated states and dysregulated states. And I argue in was in this theory that our job as therapists with these kids is to be co-regulators. That they need to learn what it feels like to be regulated.
So if you send a kid to their room that doesn't know how to calm themselves down, crying themselves into exhaustion has no resemblance whatever to, you know, self-regulation. In fact, it's a traumatic brain getting eventually exhausted. And they can't do it if they don't know what it feels like to be regulated. So that young woman that I mentioned to you earlier, what she is able to say that her boyfriend is “I'm in a dysregulated state. This is what happens to me. And this is what I need to do in order to feel calmer. And I know what that feels like now too because I practiced that.” And she couldn't have done that when she was 16, 17, really, she couldn't have done that probably when she was 22 or 23 in our work together with any reliability at all. This is a really hot button and it really took a long time. There were glimmers, but very small provocations can really send her back down the rabbit hole. So yeah, co-regulation before self-regulation. Being an adult presence. Emotion changing emotion in real experiential time. Those are some of the some of the ideas.
That's so critical, what you are saying about co-regulation. There are so many people even who are adults who had relational trauma, developmental trauma, and are not able to regulate themselves or don't know how to care or nurture themselves or meet their own needs, because they've missed all those experiences of attunement and missed that caretaking in that caregiving. And so even though their chronical age is older, that development is still missing and they need that same kind of care.
Absolutely. And I would argue that it's kind of a lifespan need that we have, to have people there for us when we need them. And you know, I'm a, I'm an excellent self-regulator. I have a million things I enjoy doing and how to calm myself down. I've worked at this for a lot of years. And when I am deeply distressed I call my sister. You know, and there, we all have thresholds where our self-soothing strategies, even if we're good at it, get exceeded and we are wired to need other people. We evolved to get comfort from others.
And you know, I think this is it a Western American or patriarchal, I don't know. I can explain it away. But our society has really given dependency a bad rap. And I think being able to ask for help when you need it is a developmental attainment. Dependency is good. It turns out the most successful happy, you know, what we call functional independent young adults, are people that are effectively dependent. They have people that are there for them, that will take care of them. They don't have the illusion that they could, they have to do it all by themselves, and that no one and the horror that no one will be there. They know that they're lovable and worthy of asking for help. I think that that is a critical thing that many adults, I agree, we are terrible at this—asking for help when we need it. And getting, finding people that we can depend on.
And it's fundamental to development. I mean, it's certainly fundamental to infant development because they are their survival depends on you know physical survival. But I think that our psychic survival depends. There's evidence to suggest that emotional isolation and physical isolation, the brain doesn't distinguish between those. And I think it's probably even worse if someone's physically there but not emotionally there for us. We feel devastated and abandoned. And the brain codes It is dangerous either way in these fMRI is this. If you need someone to be there for you that you can depend on, and they're not there, it's devastating. It's a profound emotional wound. And if it happens a lot, we don't function well. We fall apart.
I think that that's significant. Whether that is in relational trauma, whether it's developmental when someone is young, or whether it happens later, or even in situations with therapists who don't realize what they're doing, and why therapy can go so wrong or be so damaging. Because that wound can be caused by a therapist who's not being present. And I'm not talking about, you know, boundaries or things like that. I mean, I'm talking about that actual non-responsiveness.
Yeah, misattunement, and you're misattuned and you're not getting how misattuned you are. You know, or you're just minimizing how bad it is. Like you see, you say something that doesn't work, and you see and sense in your body that it didn't land or it was hurtful, even though it might not be your intent. And you see this little moment where they kind of turn away or look down or give up in some way, and stop talking or whatever, whatever the sign is that you blew it. And whether you work to repair that and notice it or not can be the difference in the whole world with this therapy that these kids who are primed for this disappointment. They're, they're expecting you to treat them as they've been treated. They're expecting this relationship to be screwed up just like other ones. And so the thing that's therapeutic is this corrective relational experience. You know, they get a new kind of relationship that's different than the one they expect. So if you're a therapist who's disappointing and misattuned, you know, just, you know, get in line. You're just another one of those people in his life. They have lots of those people. And it does happen.
I have an interesting, I have an interesting recent experience, which is very surprising to me. It ties in with the COVID question that you asked. Which is, there is this experiment in psychology that was done years ago by Ed Tronic, called the Still Face Experiment? A lot of people probably know about that. Yes. But it shows how how babies fall apart when their mothers are completely gone or their faces go completely still. And how awful that is. But they really can't do, they pull themselves back together once the mother's faced and and responsiveness returns. And so I have had this experience with the zoom freezing up. And usually, of course, your face goes still in some god awful expression, I, you know, one eye closed or whatever. But anyway, I have it worked out with all my clients that I will call you back because it freezes up and doesn't resolve. And so I did this. And I have taken to asking, “what was that like for you?” And I had this young, maybe nineteen years old, something like that, young adult, and I said, “What was that like for you when my face froze up while you were talking?” And she just burst into tears. And she said, “it was so awful.” And I wasn't even going to ask. I mean, so it was the first time I'd asked that. Now I always ask. Because it's a therapist who supposed to be there for you in the presence of you disappearing. And I don't know what maybe it's sort of like the still face experiment for our time, what's happening with the freezing on the zoom. But that was a very unexpected and moving moment that I had with this young woman who I have a relationship with. I mean, I knew her in the before times. So it was easy to repair that. And it was, but it was deep. My absence. She, you know, therapy is supposed to be in the presence of, this zoom stuff is in the absence of. We have to keep re-attuning, as what I was saying earlier, working so much harder to stay connected. Because with these kids, the opportunities for misattunement are paramount, they’re Legion. It's so easy to misattune to these kids. They're primed to that. They're ducking and bobbing and weaving stuff. They don't want, they want to be seen, they don't want to be seen. And it's much harder to do this without the whole physical being in front of me. For me anyway. Maybe other people have other other experiences as with it.
Well, and I think that kind of experience like this story you told with the zoom freezing up, or or other experiences where the therapist who is the helper or the the safe person, when they disappear or freeze up like in your zoom example, it's not just a new wound—which it is—but it also for so many of these people is a trigger of still faces from the past, so to speak.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I think for this kid, you know, this young woman, that's so much true. And you can work with it. I mean, it does bring up all of these missed opportunities for miscommunication and loss and abandonment and rejection and disappointment. You know, we're working them in real time by the technology for sure, also. You're right. It felt different. It didn't just feel like a random, “oh shoot.” You know, some kids were like, “Oh, yeah, well, it doesn't matter. It's just, you know, technology.” But I think for someone who is trying as hard as some of these kids and this young woman for sure, is trying to be in a relationship that is supportive. And she needs me right now. She's isolated, you know, beyond belief in the middle of nowhereville, when she's supposed to be at college in an urban setting and, you know, moving on with her life, here she is. So she really looks forward to therapy. And so for me to disappear on her like that is very much a compounding wound. Which is of course the last thing I want to be is compounding in her wounds. But that's what we're dealing with.
So when there are moments like that, what are ways, you talked about how important repair is. What are some of the ways that repair can happen? What does repair look like after a rupture?
Well, I mean, well, I mean, are you I guess I'm, there's the technology, pandemic piece of this, that's a compounding thing. So I'm not sure. I, when I, don't, I mean, I'm really working in a very moment-to-moment way, right? Like, I'm trying to figure out what's happening in this moment-to-moment way. So if I say something that's ridiculous or idiotic or doesn't land, and I see a kid pull away or recoil or shut down, I, it's really important to address it immediately or as soon as you get it. This is a rupture that just happened. And to the extent that therapy is about repairing ruptures in relationships, learning how to fix stuff when it's broken. These kids come into relationships with very bad experiences with, you know, ruptures. And what most of us have never had anybody when we were kids apologize to us, adults didn't do that. At least when I was coming up. And so it can be very powerful to apologize. “I'm really sorry I missed it. I can see how this was just completely the wrong thing to say or to ask. I overstepped. And I would love to try to fix this with you and try again. And hear more about what that was like for you. And I’m gonna listen.” And that sort of thing. So the repair of the rupture, to notice it, to acknowledge it, to name it, to ask what it was like and apologize. These are, we got to do this because how do you learn how to live in this world if you can't fix it when you have a disagreement with somebody or they're misattuned? I mean, they, it's inevitable, I mean that, you know. We’re, no one is perfectly attuned all the time. Zero. And I don't think it's helpful to be perfectly attuned anyway. I think that the growth comes in how you fix it. When you, when you miss it.
That's beautiful, beautiful. Was there anything else that we did not get to talk about that you wanted to cover?
Yeah. I guess the only sort of parting thing that I'm thinking about right now has to do with the way. I heard an expression which I kind of liked, which was around the pandemic, which is that we're all in the same ocean, but we're in different boats. And thinking about my work with trauma and families in this context right now, in my relatively significantly more privileged boat than a lot of people. I have a job and a safe place to live, to start, and people were safe, and you know. It's working well here, Vermont is the best place to be in the country right now. Today. It won't stay that way, probably, but anyway, for the pandemic. So I feel very blessed and lucky. And so I'm very curious about other people's experiences and how the pandemic is showing up.
But I'm also aware for us as therapists we're in it to. And to acknowledge to ourselves, to each other, to our clients that one of the reasons that life feels really hard right now for a lot of people is, you know, because it is. And that we're all living in this shared reality and we need to continually be checking in with ourselves and our own overwhelm and working with that. Because sometimes it's hard to be a therapist and to be hearing stories of overwhelm when we're also in in the same ocean and trying to stay afloat.
Such a gift to give ourselves the same kind of attunement we're trying to offer others. Just recognizing that it really is hard right now.
Yeah. That's right. And and the boundary management when you're home all the time, it gets a little bit harder to do. I mean, people say they want an appointment and you're like, well, I'm home. I guess I, you know. It's harder to set the limits and the boundaries when people are suffering the way they are right now. And we've got to. We’re finite ourselves.
Thank you so much for talking to us.
Thank you. Good luck!
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